UbrTa Update

Patrick graduated from the University of Colorado with degrees in both International Affairs and Chinese. In the Fall of 2015 he made his way to Beijing, China to enjoy the city’s famed history, culture, and Cafe de la Postes. He has written for Shanghaiist.com, China Music Radar, and Colorado’s premier lifestyle publication, The Rooster.

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Its officially translation tool month here at CSOFT, and we decided what better way to celebrate, than to interview CSOFT’s very own, Koji Iwamoto. Business Unit Manager & Beijing Site Manager of Global Services, about CSOFT’s translation management system (TMS), UbrTa. Over the course of the interview, we learned about what UbrTa is, how it can help translators and project managers, and what lies in store for the innovative TMS platform.

Can you briefly tell us what UbrTa is?

UbrTa can be called a TMS, but in my mind it is more of a project management system for translation tasks. Every translation task has four parties involved: the client, the project manager, the engineers, and the translator. UbrTa works as a centralized four party translation management system which streamlines and simplifies the translation process for all involved.

How difficult would your job be without the system?

Not having UbrTa would add a lot of extra work to my day. Pre-UbrTa, all client communication was done via email. This means that any time a PM or a client wanted to access a piece of information, they would either have to dig through a mountain of emails, or send out another email. UbrTa organizes everything in one place. It’s hugely time-saving.

What is innovative about UbrTa?

The real-time client portal is a significant step forward for project management. The real-time client portal shows all reports and project progress in real time. If a client wants a quarterly business report (QBR), they can go straight to the client portal and see it right away.

What we want to do with the system, is make it as client-focused as possible. We have designed it so that it’s customizable for each client’s need. For other translation management systems, a client is going to have to pay a huge amount of money to pay for a system that they need to adapt to. We customize for the client, the client doesn’t need to customize for us.

What’s in store for the future of UbrTa?

The system has been around for 3 years now, and we are now officially entering UbrTa 2.0. Right now we are developing the client portal. With 2.0, we are making it more adaptable and scalable. As we continue to build the platform, we are looking to further streamline all processes, but also aiming to keep the human touch. In localization, the people who matter most are the linguists, and without them, this industry wouldn’t exist. A lot of companies are now streamlining the process so much that translators just get automated messages. Our goal is to utilize technology to reduce translators’ workloads in handling miscellaneous items and help them focus on translation itself, but keep the human to human element. Language is a human thing, not a system thing.

Finally, why will clients and translators love UbrTa?

Right now translators have to wait for a PM to email a project to them. The way we envision it, all of the projects will be readily available so they can find it themselves. They will be able to see the whole scope of the project, and this way they can be active about their workload and not reactive.

For clients, there will be less emails and a more organized way of working. We will be able to show them real-time progress for all projects and give them active QBR reporting. We are really focusing on client experience and we feel like UbrTa really delivers in that aspect.

Patrick graduated from the University of Colorado with degrees in both International Affairs and Chinese. In the Fall of 2015 he made his way to Beijing, China to enjoy the city’s famed history, culture, and Cafe de la Postes. He has written for Shanghaiist.com, China Music Radar, and Colorado’s premier lifestyle publication, The Rooster.